Friday, July 16, 2010

Carbon Nanotube Electrodes – Super Lithium Battery..?

Again, researchers of MIT has made amazing discovery. The thin layers found on carbon nanotubes in batteries can actually skyrocket the amount of power delivered per unit battery up to ten times against its weight!

The electrode was fabricated with a layer-by-layer technique in which a base material is alternately dipped in solutions containing specially treated carbon nanotubes to either have a slightly positive or a slightly negative charge: when layers of the two kinds are put together, the opposite magnetic forces pull the parts tightly together, self-assembling an electrode that is porous at the nanometric scale and doesn’t seem to deteriorate at all as the battery is subjected to over a thousand charge-discharge cycles.

The electrodes produced by the team were a few microns thick, making the technology potentially useful for small portable electronics. With time, the researchers hope to be able to develop much thicker electrodes that could be used for more power-demanding applications like electric cars.

Even though the current technology still awaits to be further refined and improved, the possibility of power stored in a lithium battery would amazingly increase, at least to ten fold. Just imagine if your iPad battery could last ten times its current state? How about an electric car such as Tesla Roadster with 10 times its current power?